A Bleg to Supreme Court History Junkies

For the past couple of years I've been overseeing the design of the permanent exhibit and introductory film at the new Interpretive Learning Center at the site of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Park County, Wyoming.  It's one of the ten camps where Japanese and Japanese Americans were incarcerated between 1942 and 1945 under the control of the War Relocation Authority.

Right now we're working on the portion of the exhibit that interprets the Supreme Court's rejection of the constitutional claims in the Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and Yasui cases in 1943 and 1944.  It's a mighty abstract thing to present in a museum exhibit for the general public.

One thing every museum exhibit needs is attention-grabbing visual content.  Unadorned text doesn't cut it.  (Studies show that most museum visitors read very little text, and less and less as they go along in an exhibit.  And this exhibit on constitutionality is toward the end of the visitor's itinerary.)

I'm wondering whether people can think of an image that would help a visitor capture a sense of the Court's failure to condemn the mass curfew and mass exclusion programs.  There are obvious things -- the official photograph of the Court in its October 1944 Term, for example, or a replica of a brief from the Korematsu case -- but they tend to be pretty boring.  I'm thinking more of something like a political cartoon from the era, perhaps -- something from popular culture that dramatizes the role of the wartime Court.

(I hasten to add that I'm not seeking guidance about how to depict the curfew, exclusion, and incarceration experiences.  We've got all that well covered.  I'm looking specifically for a visual that will focus the visitor's attention on the Court itself.)

Thanks in advance for the brainstorming.

Comments

[David Bernstein]

I don't have a good example, but this obvious cartoon would be one showing the Court under FDR's thumb. He stocked the Court with New Deal loyalists and Democratic Party hacks, hardly a group one would expect to stand up to FDR in wartime. cf In re Quirin